Monday, September 28, 2015

DONALD TRUMP: THE BANKRUPTCY EXPERT

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DONALD TRUMP IN ATLANTIC CITY

The Transom

28 September 15


Donald Trump rode the casino wave in Atlantic City, leaving bankruptcies and angry creditors in his wake. http://vlt.tc/240o  “A little over a year after the Taj opened, Trump’s casino operation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, a provision that allows a company to reorganize without shutting down. Although it was a business bankruptcy, it took a personal toll. In exchange for a lower interest rate on his debt and more time to make payments, Trump agreed to limits on his personal spending. He also sold the Trump Shuttle airline, as well as his yacht. Trump filed for bankruptcy protection on his various casino enterprises three more times, in 1992, 2004, and 2009…

“Trump plays down the fact that he resorted to bankruptcy, and instead points to another sign that he is a good businessman: He left, folding his cards when others might have lost it all. Trump resigned from the board of directors of his casino company in February 2009… Trump still has a 10 percent stake in the casino company, but most of the operations are overseen by billionaire investor Carl Icahn. The Trump Plaza shut down completely in September 2014; the building is now empty, and the only sign that Trump was once there is an etching of his name that’s visible from the boardwalk…

“In Atlantic City, however, a drive down the city’s streets and a walk along the famed boardwalk show that everything did not work out fine here. Storefronts are boarded up, buildings large and small are vacant. Some city blocks have as many as three pawn shops. “Trump bet bigger than almost anybody else. He was happy to be identified with Atlantic City,” said Bryant Simon, author of “Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America.” “When the going got tough, he was out of here. He abandoned the city.” …

“There are others in Atlantic City who still admire Trump, and remember the casinos’ heyday with a nostalgic glow. Sue Foula, a 78-year-old Greek immigrant, has for decades run a tiny diner in the shadows of the Taj’s hulking parking garage. She grows teary-eyed describing how hard the economy has hit. When Trump was running the casino next door, her restaurant, Constantino’s, was typically packed. She used to serve dinner, but now closes by 2 p.m.

“She wants to sell her place but can’t find a buyer. But for none of her woes does she blame Trump. “I love him dearly,” she says, sitting in a corner with a cran-apple juice and a pack of Marlboro’s. “When Donald was here, it was better.” She knows he’ll probably never come back to Atlantic City. But she does hope he becomes president.”

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Tuesday, September 22, 2015

DO AMERICANS NO LONGER CARE ABOUT GOOD GOVERNANCE???

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The Poisonous Obama Years



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For millions of Americans, Barack Obama’s ascension to the presidency absolved the United States of myriad sins. His rise to the presidency was a redemption tale for an America that had lost its way in the immediate post-9/11 years.
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Obama’s promise was to be a transformative figure, his supporters averred. He would reverse a suspiciously colonialist Bush-era foreign policy, deliver the country into a post-racial period, and restore America’s faith in the power of collectivism and the righteous efficacy of government. As the winter of the Obama presidency approaches, it seems beyond dispute that this presidency has robbed Americans of what remaining faith they had in the value of collective action. The power of massive governmental programs to effect positive change is, at best, dubious. The tragedy of it all is that cynicism has replaced shock when the latest scandalous revelations hit the newsstands. That’s dangerous. The expectation of corruption is a condition that saps a nation’s faith in the virtue of self-governance. It is this kind of contempt for public institutions that leads republics to ruin.
Barack Obama’s administration is scandal-plagued. In its twilight years, this White House has subordinated accountability and the preservation of faith in public sector competence to exculpation from the political press.
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The in-party spent the better part of the three years that followed the deadly assault on diplomatic and CIA compounds in Benghazi by framing the investigation into it as a manifestation of Republicans’ pathological hatred for the president. That is an impression which remains cemented in the minds of many average voters who have not closely followed a congressional investigation into that affair – an investigation that exposed the scandalous details regarding how Hillary Clinton and her cadre of privileged aides comported themselves at the State Department. Those Americans who do not see the investigation as a partisan witch-hunt are apt to view it as an indictment of the political culture in Washington that afforded Clinton the leeway to flaunt the law and jeopardize American national security in order to preserve her sense of “convenience.”
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The Obama-era has made it difficult to recall that it was once the left that prided itself for serving as sentinels standing guard against abuses by powerful government agencies. “Artful” Nixonian abuses of the IRS in order to intimidate and tarnish the reputations of political opponents were once a Republican phenomenon. Today, yet another simmering scandal involving the misuse of the IRS has ensnared Democrats. As such, it is dismissed as a non-issue by the left and partisans in the press.
Americans recently learned that, like Clinton, Lerner conducted official business via a private email account where she went by the name “Toby Miles.” The emails sent via that account are among the hundreds that have been shielded from congressional investigators, but those that have been recovered reflect a searing disdain for conservatives against whom Lerner has been accused of conspiring to limit their ability to participate in civic affairs. “Citizens United is by far the worst thing that has ever happened to this country,” Lerner, who has been accused of targeting conservative political action committees with undue scrutiny, wrote. “We are witnessing the end of ‘America.’”
Motive and opportunity having been established, we are told that there is nothing to see here. You’re just being paranoid.
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It is, however, the nonplused reaction from the public and the watchdog press to the revelations involving the manipulation of intelligence related to the campaign against the Islamic State that is the most disturbing. On August 25, a bombshell report in the New York Times indicated that the Pentagon inspector general’s office was investigating credible claims that CENTCOM officials altered intelligence reports related to ISIS. Those reports had been reviewed by ranking war planners, including the president, and were designed to paint a rosier picture of the state of the campaign than was warranted. Over a month later, dozens intelligence operatives have come forward to confirm the IG’s findings. Reports regarding terror activity in Iraq were “grossly thrown to the side,” alleges former U.S. Army official William Kotel. “They’ve spent more money and time trying to push down this intelligence … than they have actually spending time and effort on real security,” he alleged of his bosses.
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The scale of this scandal, as exposed in a recent piece published in The Daily Beast, is chilling. “Some analysts have also complained that they felt ‘bullied’ into reaching conclusions favored by their bosses, two separate sources familiar with analysts’ complaints said,” the report read. “In some cases, analysts were also urged to state that killing particular ISIS leaders and key officials would diminish the group and lead to its collapse. Many analysts, however, didn’t believe that simply taking out top ISIS leaders would have an enduring effect on overall operations.” How high up the chain does this culture of corruption that prevailed at CENTCOM lead? Who knows? No one is asking.
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It is simply too coincidental that this White House, which wanted nothing more than to avoid becoming embroiled in a new conflict in the Middle East, was being fed intelligence that reinforced their preferred preconceptions. It is the height of irresponsibility for an informed citizenry to learn that the commander-in-chief of the military was allegedly being misled by his subordinates, putting American interests in jeopardy in the process, and to simply brush it off as the cost of doing business.
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Do Americans no longer care about good governance? Has the public grown so inured to scandal that most are willing to dismiss them or to excuse them when they arise? Is the popular political press so committed to preserving the mythology surrounding this administration that it would abdicate its responsibilities to the public? The reprehensible revelations above are just a handful of the abuses of public trust that have occurred over the last six years.  Americans have grown complacent over the course of Barack Obama’s presidency. A sense of disillusionment that would shrug off these and other misuses of the public trust is unnerving and dangerous. It is a level of dissatisfaction that paves the way for Caesarism. For the sake of the republican ideals, the voters and the press must get serious about holding this White House to account.

Monday, September 21, 2015

WILL THE REAL NOMINEE PLEASE STAND UP ? CARLY FIORINA JUST DID !!!

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Did the Real Republican Nominee Just Stand Up?


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THE FEDERALIST 
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Last week, I highlighted a number of things to look for in the second Republican debate. The only really important one was: will the real nominee please stand up?
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My premise is that the three people at the top of the polls right now have never been elected to or served in public office, and that makes them highly unlikely to be the eventual nominee. Outsiders are appealing, but they never get the nomination, and probably for good reason. Not only do they have no experience running campaigns and winning elections, they also have no direct track record we can look to if we want to guess how they will really vote and make decisions under the pressures of public office. This early, a few months into the primary race, we don’t even know whether they have the discipline and commitment to see a campaign out to the end, or whether they will decide the actual lifestyle of a politician isn’t worth living.
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(Donald Trump may already have given his answer to that last question by dropping out of a major South Carolina campaign event in order to close a “significant business transaction.” Because the killer negotiator who’s going to get Mexico to pay for the wall has so little clout that he can’t reschedule the date of a business deal.)
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So I’ve been wondering which of the remaining experienced politicians would come out of last week looking like a new front-runner. Well, we’ve had a couple of days and a few poll results, and we’re beginning to see the answer.
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Two candidates came out of last week with a definite gain in the polls.
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There are two candidates who came out of last week with a definite gain in the polls. Not by coincidence, they are the ones who made the biggest impression in last week’s debate. But here’s the twist. One of the “real” candidates who is emerging is one of political outsiders I had dismissed. And it’s getting a little harder to do that.
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The two people who broke out in a new CNN poll are Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio.
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Fiorina rocketed to second place in the polls at 15%, with her support mostly coming from the other political outsiders, Donald Trump and Ben Carson. Trump is still leading at 24%, but that’s down from 32% in CNN’s last poll from a few weeks ago, raising the hope that we may already have seen Peak Donald.
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We may already have seen Peak Donald.
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It’s easy to see why Fiorina has done so well. She may have never held office, but I’m now convinced we can’t dismiss her as a personality-driven protest vote. (I’ll let you decide for yourself who that description applies to.) What struck people about her most in the debate was not just her poise and spunkiness, but the depth of her knowledge and thinking about the big issues. There were only two candidates on stage, for example, who could really tell you exactly what was going wrong in the Middle East and exactly what they would do about. And believe it or not, there are a lot of us who think that’s kind of important for someone who wants to be commander-in-chief.
Three hours of debate can be summed up in about three minutes.
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The other person who gave those sorts of answers was Marco Rubio. In retrospect, the whole three hours of the debate—five if you include the undercard that almost nobody watched—can be summed up in about three minutes, in a three-way exchange involving Trump, Rubio, and Fiorina. CNN doesn’t seem to have posted video of this specific moment in the debate, and besides, you can appreciate it better by reading it.
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It begins with a question from the moderator about Russia.
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TAPPER: Let’s move to Russia if we could. Russia is sending troops and tanks into Syria right now to prop up a US enemy, Bashar al-Assad. President Obama’s incoming top general says, quote, “Russia presents the greatest threat to our national security.”

Mr. Trump, you say you can do business with President Vladimir Putin, you say you will get along, quote, “very well.” What would you do right now if you were president, to get the Russians out of Syria?

TRUMP: So, number one, they have to respect you. He has absolutely no respect for President Obama. Zero.

Syria’s a mess. You look at what’s going on with ISIS in there, now think of this: we’re fighting ISIS. ISIS wants to fight Syria. Why are we fighting ISIS in Syria? Let them fight each other and pick up the remnants.

I would talk to him. I would get along with him. I believe—and I may be wrong, in which case I’d probably have to take a different path, but I would get along with a lot of the world leaders that this country is not getting along with. We don’t get along with China. We don’t get along with the heads of Mexico. We don’t get along with anybody, and yet, at the same time, they rip us left and right. They take advantage of us economically and every other way. We get along with nobody.

I will get along—I think—with Putin, and I will get along with others, and we will have a much more stable—stable world.

TAPPER: So, you—just to clarify, the only answer I heard to the question I asked is that you would—you would reach out to Vladimir Putin, and you would do what? You would…

TRUMP: I believe that I will get along—we will do—between that, Ukraine, all of the other problems, we won’t have the kind of problems that our country has right now with Russia and many other nations.

TAPPER: Senator Rubio, you’ve taken a very different approach to the question of Russia. You’ve called Vladimir Putin a, quote, “gangster.” Why would President Rubio’s approach be more effective than President Trump’s?

RUBIO: Well, first of all, I have an understanding of exactly what it is Russia and Putin are doing, and it’s pretty straightforward. He wants to reposition Russia, once again, as a geopolitical force. He himself said that the destruction of the Soviet Union—the fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, and now he’s trying to reverse that.

He’s trying to destroy NATO. And this is what this is a part of. He is exploiting a vacuum that this administration has left in the Middle East. Here’s what you’re gonna see in the next few weeks: the Russians will begin to fly—fly combat missions in that region, not just targeting ISIS, but in order to prop up Assad. He will also, then, turn to other countries in the region and say, “America is no longer a reliable ally, Egypt. America is no longer a reliable ally, Saudi Arabia. Begin to rely on us.”

What he is doing is he is trying to replace us as the single most important power broker in the Middle East, and this president is allowing it. That is what is happening in the Middle East. That’s what’s happening with Russia, and…

TAPPER: Thank you, Senator Rubio. I want to bring in Carly Fiorina.

FIORINA: Having met Vladimir Putin, I wouldn’t talk to him at all. We’ve talked way too much to him.

What I would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic states. I’d probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany. Vladimir Putin would get the message.

By the way, the reason it is so critically important that every one of us know General Suleimani’s name is because Russia is in Syria right now, because the head of the Quds force traveled to Russia and talked Vladimir Putin into aligning themselves with Iran and Syria to prop up Bashar al-Assad.

Russia is a bad actor, but Vladimir Putin is someone we should not talk to, because the only way he will stop is to sense strength and resolve on the other side, and we have all of that within our control. We could rebuild the Sixth Fleet. I will. We haven’t. We could rebuild the missile defense program. We haven’t. I will. We could also, to Senator Rubio’s point, give the Egyptians what they’ve asked for, which is intelligence. We could give the Jordanians what they’ve asked for, bombs and materiel. We have not supplied it. I will. We could arm the Kurds. They’ve been asking us for three years. All of this is within our control.
Note to Trump supporters. When we’ve been saying all along that we wanted a more serious candidate, this is what we meant. You insisted that by “serious” we meant: in line with the Beltway conventional wisdom. What we actually meant was: based on detailed knowledge and thinking. What we meant was: not just declaring that the US will be strong, but also being able to name the enemy’s strategy and priorities, and to name specific measures that the US can take to thwart that strategy.
When it comes to countering Putin, Trump is sure that Putin will be impressed with him and that they’ll get along. After all, he’s Donald Trump! And that’s it, that’s the whole of his strategy. Rubio and Fiorina could name the specific reasons why Putin would take them, and the United States, seriously.
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Rubio and Fiorina were showing us who is really prepared to lead.
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In this context, Rubio and Fiorina did not need to send out zingers about how we don’t need an “apprentice” in the White House. They were showing us who is really prepared to take the reins of American foreign policy. The same pattern applied on other issues, not just foreign policy, and it explains why Fiorina and Rubio are the candidates who broke out in the polls afterward. They were the ones who earned it.
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There’s not much point analyzing why other, lower-ranking candidates didn’t break out. I can give some general impressions. Rand Paul is too unfocused; he’s shooting from the hip and doesn’t really know what his central sales pitch is. Scott Walker is running a great campaign—for Secretary of Labor. Ted Cruz is eloquent, but while Fiorina and Rubio give extemporaneous answers based on extensive knowledge, Cruz tends to give set-piece speeches; there is a difference between sounding prepared and sounding rehearsed. But in a field that is still so crowded, with candidates given only a few opportunities to answer questions, there are a lot of reasons why a candidate might not break out, and better luck to them next time, if they’re able to stick around that long.
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Yet if last week’s performances continue—and given the people involved, it’s likely that they will—the primaries are starting to look a little more like a Fiorina-Rubio contest. The real contenders for the nomination just stood up.
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Follow Robert on Twitter.
Photo By: Marc Nozell

Saturday, September 5, 2015

LONG LIVE THE QUEEN IN RETIREMENT !!!!!!!!!!

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A Message from the Queen


As you know, my dear people, the last year for me has been an annus horribilus. The Royal House of Clinton has been tormented by questions about our handling of finances and subjected to tiresome questions about the tragic events in Benghazi - in the furthest regions of our empire. And, sadly, also questions about my Royal e-mails.

Nevertheless, I will not be daunted in my desire and commitment to serve you the people. For the next seventeen months I will be traveling among you as one of you, to listen to your deepest longings and needs. I will be with you in your Wal-Mart and beside you in your Burger Kings. I will drive with you down the busy interstate highways of our land sharing your poverty and needs with you.

How well I remember the days when the Duke of Arkansas and I were impoverished. After we were expelled from our Washington Palace we hardly had two mansions to rub together. We were so poor we had to remove thousands of dollars of china, flatware, carpets and gifts from the Washington Palace just to survive, only to be forced to return much of the treasures by Washington. Now, happily, benefactors from around our empire have given just enough for us to scrape by.

During those difficult times we had to cut back when our daughter was married. We only had three million dollars to spend on her wedding, and I remember our hopes as she moved into her $10 million Manhattan apartment that one day she would be able to move on from that humble abode to something more fitting. After working for MSNBC for a starting salary of a mere $600,000.00, what could she do.

So as I travel across our kingdom to meet you all, I will be listening and sharing with you. Then when the time for the royal election comes, I know I can count on you to crown me as your rightful monarch so that I can continue King Obama’s policies, and we can all live happily ever after.
Queen Hilarity Rodham Clinton

Thursday, September 3, 2015

DONALD TRUMP IS NO REPUBLICAN, HE IS A RADICAL DEMOGOGUE !!!

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THE TRENDS THAT LED TO TRUMP:

Tom Edsall and Michael Lind have pieces this week advancing similar arguments about the rise of Donald Trump. On Edsall’s side, it’s that Republicans were inevitably becoming the representative of angry white voters ever since the “Southern Strategy”. http://vlt.tc/22xm.


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On Lind’s, it’s that Trump is an indication the Tea Party stood for nothing more than what these angry white populist voters wanted – that it had no significant ideological component of limited government at all, and was really just another in a long line of white anti-immigrant populism. http://vlt.tc/22xn  
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 Lind’s piece, as is typical of his work, relies on virtually no data and copious amounts of historical revisionism – this is the man, after all, who argues that libertarianism is nothing more than a racist cult (really) and claimed Calvin Coolidge was a terrible racist. http://vlt.tc/wnv  (To his credit, he is the American Poet Laureate when it comes to writing love poems about actual racist Woodrow Wilson.) http://vlt.tc/wl5  So let’s set that aside and focus instead on Edsall’s piece, which repeats a number of tropes that I hear regularly from smart people, which ought to be reconsidered.
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Here is Edsall’s argument, in a thumbnail: “The Trump phenomenon arguably represents a culmination of the 50-plus-year transformation of the Republican Party. That transformation was set in motion in 1964, when Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee, opposed the newly enacted Civil Rights Act. What remained of longstanding black support for the Republican Party disappeared overnight. In the four presidential elections before 1964, according to American National Election Studies, Republican candidates had won an average of 30 percent of the minority vote. From 1964 to 2008, the Republican share dropped to an average of 6.1 percent of the minority vote. Since 1964, the Republican Party has become, in effect, a white party.”

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First, I think anyone interested in politics needs to be aware of the work of Sean Trende in rebutting this concept. He has advanced a very capable argument that the actual trendline we see historically is a 1928-present trend of southern white voters moving into the Republican Party – a trend that was not tied to the "Southern Strategy" but to white voters’ break with increasing Democratic progressivism. http://vlt.tc/22xo  “The gradual realignment of the South had been going for nearly forty years by 1964, and continued at a glacial pace after that…” 

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In 1928, Herbert Hoover “won 47.6 percent of the South's popular vote… The Great Depression set Republicans back, but post-1948, Republicans began seriously working to pick the Democrats' lock on the South. In 1952, Eisenhower carried three Southern states. In 1956, he carried five, including deep Southern states like Louisiana… Eisenhower received at least one-third of the vote in every state in the Old Confederacy. The same is true for Nixon in 1960, when the pro-Civil Rights Nixon, who, as Kornacki observes, was representing an Administration that enforced Brown v. Board, carried Virginia, Tennessee and Florida. Texas, North Carolina and South Carolina were all decided by five points or less.”
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The point is that this idea that the “Southern Strategy” dramatically transformed the Republican Party “overnight”, as Edsall suggests, is just not justified by the data. The trendline is clear and steady, and the 1964 election was not the spark for a new realignment. Dan McLaughlin has more here. http://vlt.tc/22xp Larry Sabato has trends back to 1952 on this point, also predating civil rights. http://vlt.tc/22xr  And Gerard Alexander is also worth reading on this point. http://vlt.tc/22xq

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There’s a good argument to be made that the Democratic Party has been losing whites as much as the Republican Party has been gaining them. And when it comes to mourning the loss of the Democratic white voter, I suggest you read Tom Edsall himself. http://vlt.tc/22xs   Indeed, the most significant pre-Trump example of identity politics for white people in the modern era also came within the Appalachian context – and the Democratic push for Barack Obama. http://vlt.tc/22xt   “The southwestern region, rising from the Roanoke Valley up to the Appalachian Plateau, is a place of small farms, coal mines, and chronic economic hard times. It was settled in the eighteenth century by Scots-Irish Calvinists who fled Anglican-dominated Ulster and, eventually, came to that portion of Virginia which the planter aristocracy didn’t want. Their descendants live in small hill towns that are nearer, in mileage and in spirit, to the old factory town of Ironton, Ohio, than to the glass office towers of northern Virginia. Three weeks after the Virginia primary, the mostly white, working-class voters of southern Ohio, a significant portion of them of Scots-Irish descent, helped deliver that state to Hillary Clinton. In the next weeks, their kin did the same in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Indiana, and Kentucky.”

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In 2012, many of these same white voters stayed home, denying Mitt Romney the support he needed. http://vlt.tc/22y0  They did not believe he stood for them – even as the more ideologically driven Tea Party voters swallowed hard and pulled the lever. And while that’s bad for the GOP, it’s an indication that the idea that Republicans are becoming an exclusively white party, and that the seeds for this are found in 50 year old decisions, is just not justified. Nor is it borne out by recent election results (and you don’t just need to point to the success of George W. Bush); Republicans, including many conservative Republicans, had dramatic success among Hispanic and Asian voters in the 2014 midterms. http://vlt.tc/22xu 

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Demographic trends showing rising ethnic populations do not spell doom for the GOP. Trump’s base with its xenophobia is an organic phenomenon that draws upon preexisting sentiment and trends. So too is Obama’s base with its authoritarian elitism. But to suggest that Trump is a natural product of 1964, as Edsall does, or that he is a representation that we were all wrong about the Tea Party, as Lind does, is just wrong. Polling consistently indicates that Trump’s strongest supporters don't match up with Tea Party demographics – his voters are more moderate, less well off, more disaffected. Take just one aspect of his polling success: Trump does best at attracting Republicans who don't typically vote in primaries. http://vlt.tc/22j7 That’s pretty much the opposite of a Tea Partier.

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It is therefore an error to regard the Trump phenomenon as restricted to just the Republican Party – and it’s why, had Trump decided to occupy the Democratic Party or an Independent status instead, I expect we would be seeing many of the same reactions and tensions emerge. It is highly mediagenic representation of a society-wide problem: a collapse in popular faith in institutions and elites. http://vlt.tc/22xw  Anyone thinking they will be spared its effects is deluding themselves. http://vlt.tc/22xx  It’s not just the Republicans: it’s the whole country. http://vlt.tc/22xy  The American people no longer trust our leaders to lead, our thinkers to think, our governors to govern. http://vlt.tc/22xz  They are mad as hell about being ignored for so long – and so they are now backing an authoritarian who they believe speaks for them. Honestly – can you blame them?

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Oh, and what’s the Republican Party leadership’s answer to all of this? A loyalty pledge. http://vlt.tc/22y2  Really.

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